For Jesse Eisenberg’s first film as a director – 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World – he kept himself behind the camera, turning an exclusive focus to his new discipline. Now, with a bit more confidence under his belt, he’s back as director, writer, and star of his second feature, A Real Pain, a multi-hyphenate gamble that really pays off in a very funny and rather moving dramedy that never once feels like an exercise in vanity.
Key to this is the fact that Eisenberg gives himself the less showy role in this two-hander character study. He plays David, a mostly straight-laced neurotic New Yorker (in other words, it’s a classic Eisenberg role, and he’s smart enough to use his own reputation as shorthand character-building), who is the anchor of the story, but it’s Kieran Culkin, as David’s manic-depressive cousin Benji, who gets the most of the laughs and tears. David and Benji, once incredibly close but now a little separated thanks to David being much more of a successful adult, are reunited after a period of not talking by the death of their beloved Holocaust-survivor grandmother, who left them some money to go on Jewish heritage tour of Poland together.
By default, this would be an emotionally taxing trip, David and Benji joining a Jewish tour group, led by gentile British historian James (Will Sharpe), through the many monuments to Jewish tragedy and resilience in Poland, and it’s only made more so by Benji’s frazzled emotional state, teetering on the line between extroverted and outright mad. A Real Pain can be repetitive – the formula for most sequences is; David and Benji go to a historical site, Benji has an outburst, it’s either awkward or cathartic, then do it all again – but the emotional and comedic cores of the acting and writing are strong enough to support this lack of variety.
In all three of his creative tasks, Eisenberg is unshowy but solid (though I’d have liked to get more of a sense of place in Poland), while Culkin is magnetic as Benji. Inconsiderate yet charming, self-absorbed yet also painfully aware of his own weaknesses, Benji feels like a perfect follow-up role for Culkin after saying goodbye to Roman Roy, his complications never neatly resolved, weighing him down in different ways from scene to scene. It’s the kind of performance that earns awards attention from the moment it premieres (in this case, all the way back in January at Sundance), and though I’m not sure the film around him has the heft to go all the way, Culkin would make a worthy individual nominee.
If you’ve read anything about A Real Pain, then it’s pretty much exactly the film you’d assume it is. It never really surprises, but Eisenberg and Culkin manage to avoid that becoming a weakness with a fantastic central double act that plays forcefully and precisely to their specific strengths, creating a strained family dynamic that is both movingly real and laugh-out-loud funny.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 